Landfalls

by Naomi J. Williams

  “Of course,” I say. We should bury the man at sea, I tell him. This practice, common in French ships, of keeping corpses on board till they can be buried on land, is repugnant and insalubrious.

  He agrees, then instructs one of his officers to find a carpenter and sailmaker to help the young lieutenant prepare his servant’s body. An hour later the captain arrives on deck, hails the flagship through the mist to report that we’ve had a death on board, then summons all hands for the service. Father Receveur has the perfect, sonorous voice for the office. The fog renders everything and everyone less corporeal; it’s as if the priest were consigning us all to the deep. But it’s the servant’s body that’s dropped overboard. He vanishes before we hear the splash, the mist swallowing him whole before he hits the water. The captain runs a hand roughly across his face as he turns from the burial of the man who was not his responsibility.

  For the first time in my long career as a naval surgeon, I am without patients.

  François finds me again. “He’s still at it,” he says, clutching more pages.

  My Lord, I hardly need tell you of your sons’ superior qualities as officers. Had they been spared, they would have had brilliant careers.

  Indeed, I begin to wonder how I can come home when they cannot.

  “I need more laudanum,” François says.

  “Shh!” I command. Our cabins’ walls may be made of thick planks, but there are gaps. I fix the boy with what I hope is a hard stare. “You’re not using it yourself, are you?”

  He shakes his head, eyes wide with surprise and insult.

  “Is he eating?”

  “Mostly broth and bread.”

  “His cook should—”

  “It’s what he asks for, Monsieur Lavaux.”

  Laudanum and broth. The consumptive servant’s last diet.

  “You have to do something, Monsieur Lavaux,” the boy says. “He’s going to die.”

  “Nonsense,” I say sharply. “The captain is in perfect health.”

  But I see no sign of the captain for several days. The officers don’t say anything in my hearing about it, but I sense among them an underlying anxiety.

  For a week, we alternate between white calms and white gales.

  Then, a clearing. The crew pours onto the deck, starved for sunlight. We can see for leagues in every direction. Great snowbound peaks in the eastern distance. Lush green islands dotting the coastline. A bay opens before us, too deep to see to the other end. The officers note its position, but we sail on without exploring it, our orders to reach Monterey before mid-September. Father Receveur joins me again at the rail.

  “Perhaps that was the Northwest Passage,” I say as the opening recedes from view.

  “There is no Northwest Passage,” he declares.

  “You know this for a fact.”

  “Not for a fact—not a geographical fact, at least,” he says. He avidly scans the wide view before us as if to make up for the days when there was nothing to see. “I suspect this continent was not created for the convenience of European commerce,” he says. “There’s no easy way here—no short cuts.” He breaks his outward gaze and looks over at me with a grin. When he smiles one can see the youth that’s usually hidden under his cassock and behind that clerical certainty.

  “Father,” I say suddenly. “What if we wrote that letter for the captain?”

  He turns to me. No longer smiling. “You cannot be serious.”

  We retreat to the privacy of his cabin.

  My Lord, it is with the most painful regret that I inform you of the loss of your sons in a tragic and unforeseeable accident in Alaska on July 11, 1786.

  I have asked that the official report from the flagship be forwarded to you so you may see for yourself the precautions we took. Not one of us had any presentiment of danger.

  “Too defensive,” I say.

  “He has to assure the marquis that he didn’t wantonly throw his sons into danger.”

  “Too late for that.”

  I hope it may be of some consolation to know that your sons were lost while heroically, though unwisely, trying to aid another boat in distress. Sadly, both boats and all 21 men aboard were lost in the violence of the currents in which they were caught.

  “Is that actually consoling?” the priest says.

  “I don’t know. Is it?”

  The moment we learned of the accident, Monsieur de Lapérouse and I ordered search parties to find and help survivors. Indeed, I myself directed one such party in the area of the bay where the boats were lost. Alas, we found no one, not even one body, despite many hours spent searching in the days following the tragedy.

  “Now that is defensive.”

  “Can it be helped?”

  We were obliged to delay our departure as a result …

  “Obliged?” I say.

  “What’s wrong with ‘obliged’?”

  “It sounds as if we begrudged the time spent looking for the lost men.”

  Indeed, we delayed our departure by two weeks in the vain hope that someone would turn up alive or that we would find at least one body to properly mourn and bury.

  “That’s better.”

  Neither of us wants to write out the final copy, but I prevail. “Medical men can’t write anything decipherable,” I say. He agrees to play scribe if I deliver the letter.

  I find François in the galley, drinking with the captain’s personal cook. “You do realize that if you turn this boy into a drunkard, there will be less for you to imbibe, Monsieur Deveau?” I say as I draw François away. I take him up on deck, where the fog has enfolded us again, curling around the masts and sails and men like tentacles. “Don’t give it to him directly,” I say, handing the letter to François. “Just place it discreetly on his writing table.” The boy wanders off unevenly. After he disappears into the mist, I look up and watch while thin, wet ribbons of cloud rush overhead, distorting the light of the quarter moon.

  Dead calm the next day. Midmorning, I’m alphabetizing my collections of remedies and liniments when I hear a commotion outside the infirmary. I open the door to the young lieutenant holding up a bloodied and dazed François.

  “What in God’s name?” I cry.

  “He did something to greatly displease the captain,” the lieutenant says.

  “The captain?” The captain has never struck a crew member before.

  The lieutenant shrugs unhappily. He looks at François with such angry bewilderment I’m afraid the boy may sustain more blows.

  “Go get Father Receveur,” I tell the lieutenant, then take the boy into the infirmary. “What did you do, François?”

  “What did you do?” the boy shouts back.

  He is a mess of tears and snot and sweat, but the physical injuries are relatively minor: a small contusion on the back of his head, some bruises and lacerations on his arms and legs.

  Father Receveur rushes in. “My dear boy, what happened?”

  François regards us both with aggrieved belligerence. “He held up your paper and kept shouting, ‘Who did this? Who did you talk to?’”

  The priest and I look at each other. The priest’s usual confidence drains out of his face along with all of its color.

  “What did you tell him?” I ask François.

  “You’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” He juts out his chin then grimaces in pain.

  “Yes, we would very much like to know.”

  The boy sneers at us and at our patrician fear. “I didn’t say anything,” he says. “Pretended I didn’t know what he was talking about. That’s when he shoved me into the wall.”

  “You could have offered us up, my boy,” the priest says. I roll my eyes. Ex post facto declarations of selflessness: so typical of the religious.

  “Could have,” the boy says. “But didn’t. Anyway, he’s finished the letters. He put his paper and quills and inkpots away.”

  The priest and I exchange glances again. So it might have worked, our raised eyebrows seem to say. We do
n’t know, of course. Maybe he sealed up our letter and added it to his stack. Maybe he copied out our words in his own hand. Maybe the fact that someone on board felt compelled to compose it for him spurred him to complete his own letter. Or maybe the new letter isn’t to the Marquis de La Borde at all but to someone else—the minister of marine, perhaps—complaining of interfering crew members, asking that François’s pay be cut—or requesting that his chaplain and surgeon be transferred from the ship at the next port of call.

  I clean the boy up and send him to his berth for the day.

  “We should teach that boy to read,” Father Receveur says. “He might make something of himself.”

  I knock on the captain’s door, dread knotting up my insides. But when I see him, I realize his dread has been worse than mine. His face is pale with misery. “Is he all right?” he says.

  “He’ll be fine,” I say. “But if he could be relieved of duty today—”

  “Of course.”

  “Is there anything I can do for you, sir?” I ask.

  He shakes his head at first, then says, “A few weeks ago you offered me a sleeping draught—”

  “I’d be happy to help with that, sir.”

  “Thank you, Monsieur Lavaux.”

  “Sir—”

  He looks up, wary and ashamed, but I can see that his anger is not yet spent.

  “He’s very devoted to you, you know.” It’s not what I meant to say.

  The captain blinks hard as he waves me away.

  I go back out on deck. I’m needed below—a short-lived but quite unpleasant stomach ailment seems to have broken out among the marines. But first I stand gazing out into the blankness around me. I look down over the rail and am surprised to find dark shapes below—seabirds of some kind. From their postures I can tell they’re sitting on the surface of the water. But the water on which they bob remains invisible, overlaid with mist and opaque to the sky. The birds seem to float, unmoored, in midair, like magical creatures who know how to hold themselves in suspension.

  SEVEN

  LETTERS FROM MONTEREY

  Excerpts of dispatches sent on the Spanish corvette La Princesa in October 1786, from Monterey, California

  I. The report of Lieutenant Estevan Martínez, commander of the supply ships La Princesa and La Favorita, to His Excellency Don Bernardo Galvez, Viceroy of Mexico, Mexico City

  Excellency, I have the honor to report our safe arrival in Monterey on August 16 and the successful delivery of supplies for both the presidio and the mission. There was of course a disagreement between Governor Don Pedro Fages and His Reverence Fray Fermín Lasuén over the proper distribution of the wine, and when I produced the official order from San Blas showing that both men were overstating their due, they turned their dissatisfaction from each other to me. It happens every year.

  The three new priests I also saw safely conducted to Fray Lasuén’s custody, and glad I was to be free of them. One was seasick the entire voyage, the second relentlessly preached damnation at my men, and the third, a young man of excellent family who was a pleasant enough passenger at first, over the course of our voyage fell into a state of such severe melancholy that my officers took it in turns to watch him lest he throw himself overboard. I communicated my anxiety about this young man to Fray Lasuén, who is of the opinion that once the man is settled in his work at the mission, he will recover his spirits. I had occasion to see my former passengers once or twice before our departure, and I am happy to report Fray Lasuén’s wisdom confirmed in this, as Fray Faustino Solá, the young melancholic, seemed much improved.

  Your Excellency will remember that right before my departure, you informed me of a dispatch from the French consul at Cádiz requesting consideration for a French voyage of exploration planning to visit our settlements in Alta California. How fortunate we were to receive this news when we did, for it was not one month after my arrival that two French frigates appeared out of the mist—a circumstance that might have caused alarm had we not been forewarned. I lost no time in sending pilots to guide the Boussole and the Astrolabe to safe anchorages in the bay and also had chickens, cheese, wine, and fresh vegetables delivered, as I suspected the Frenchmen had been many months without civilized food. I had the great honor to be the first to welcome the Count de Lapérouse and his second-in-command, Viscount de Langle, to Alta California, and to introduce them and their officers, artists, and men of science to the governor and to their reverences the fathers of San Carlos Mission in Carmel.

  Indeed, I believe the Frenchmen’s pleasure was no less than ours, as every hospitality was extended to them during their ten-day stay. They were fêted at the governor’s house, which is by all accounts a happier place than it was last year, and at the mission, and finally aboard La Princesa. In the days before their departure, I made my men available to assist them in the loading of fresh water, food, and wood. Everything pleased and interested them, and I am confident that the letters I now convey from them to their friends and superiors in France will tell of the warmth of their reception.

  The count is a man of great understanding. I had occasion to speak with him at length about their exploration of Alaska this summer. They suffered a terrible calamity there, so the subject was a painful one. But it is the count’s belief that the Russians are expanding their activities in this part of the continent. Upon my return to Mexico, I will propose to Your Excellency an expedition to Alaska to establish and confirm Spanish claims and interests there …

  II. From Pedro Fages, Governor of Alta and Baja California, to His Excellency Don Bernardo Galvez, Viceroy of Mexico, Mexico City

  … I thank Your Excellency most particularly for the news of the French expedition, for they arrived on September 14, only a few weeks after your letter. My wife and I had the honor of opening our home to the Count de Lapérouse and his entourage. A more courtly and cultured group of guests we are unlikely to host again while we are here.

  The visit was a source of great solace to my wife. Your Excellency knows she has suffered under the privations of life in Alta California. You may not know that we lost a child in May—a girl, only eight days old. We were heartbroken, and for my wife I feared another visitation of the dangerous excitability she exhibited last year. But the arrival of the Frenchmen revived her spirits enormously. I was anxious that when the frigates sailed away, she would fall again into despondency. But the memory of the honor and pleasure bestowed on us by their visit seems to sustain her still. One of the expedition artists was kind enough to paint her portrait. It now graces a wall in our home, a memento of our refined visitors and the pleasure of their society.

  My only regret is that we were not able to enjoy the company of these excellent men a little longer. His Reverence Fray Lasuén and his priests invited them to the mission, so we were obliged to escort our guests to Carmel after only two days. Indeed, their reverences vied with us for the Frenchmen’s attentions from the moment they arrived, hurrying hither as soon as they heard the news. Glad I was that day for the distinctions of dress! Captain Martínez had already met the count and strutted over his introductions as if he were an intimate of the French court. Fray Lasuén was little better. If not for his brown cassock, he might have been mistaken for the governor!

  When they first arrived, our guests were still mourning the loss of some twenty crew members killed in an accident in Alaska. I believe that their time here proved of great comfort to them. There is nothing quite like the company of other Europeans and Catholics. Indeed, the visit was of much benefit to all concerned, with gifts and friendship freely exchanged. The count insisted on paying for provisions we would happily have offered as gifts. The Viscount de Langle, his second-in-command, also a man of refinement, gave to the mission a small millstone to assist in the grinding of corn.

  It brings me no pleasure to end this letter with unpleasantness, Your Excellency. However, I must bring to your attention a grave matter concerning His Reverence Fray Matías Noriega, the priest who serves under Fra
y Lasuén. Fray Noriega has always been harsh in his treatment of the neophytes, but lately his punishments have grown excessive. My soldiers in Carmel are unsentimental men who have no particular love for the Indian, but they have asked to be transferred. His Reverence moderated his punishments during the Frenchmen’s visit, but has, since their departure, applied them with redoubled violence. He recently abandoned the traditional leather whip in favor of chains. I fear lest these excesses incite a revolt among the Indians.

  Last week a female neophyte, age about twenty-five, died two days after being punished. She had run away from the mission for the third time in as many months. My men found her and delivered her to Fray Lasuén’s custody, but she was turned over to Fray Noriega. My men report that His Reverence compelled one of the younger priests, newly arrived with Captain Martínez, to witness and assist in the discipline. This man has since fallen prey to fits of madness.

  I know that in making this report, I may appear to be vindictive and ungrateful. The mission’s numerous complaints about the conduct of my soldiers are well-known. So is the great service their reverences—and Fray Noriega in particular—rendered to me last year. I have appealed to Fray Lasuén, but Fray Noriega is by all accounts prodigiously skilled at appeasing his superiors. Given this state of affairs, I have ordered my men at the mission to ignore henceforth any request from their reverences to retrieve runaways. My men are charged with the protection of the mission and its inmates, not with hunting down unwilling converts and delivering them to death …

  III. From Eulalia Callis de Fages, wife of Don Pedro Fages, Governor of California, to her mother, Doña Rosa Callis, Mexico City. [Editor’s note: The text rendered in italics is in a different ink and hand from the original; the fading of this ink over time has revealed some of the original text.]

  My Dear Mother,

  Last year I was not permitted able to write to you from the mission, where I was held against my will, away from my children and friends, stayed until I agreed to submit to reconcile with my husband, recant my accusations against him, thus restoring his honor and my own. This I eventually did, for as unhappy as I was with my marriage, a cold, damp cell is no place for a lady, and I grieved for my children, who were without their mother for three long months. Don Pedro welcomed me warmly enough, and before long I was with child again. Don Pedro was delighted and said the child would symbolize our renewed life together. She was born in May, a beautiful, dark-eyed girl with black hair, but eight days later she was gone. I asked my husband, “What does she symbolize now?” but he made no answer only wept.